Hanoi

After our last post, we spent the rest of the day in Bangkok. Highlights of the day include meeting a baby elephant in the street (a baby elephant was taller than me, but alot smaller than I envision an elephant - hence, baby) , ate pizza with corn, pineapples, tomatoes, onions and mushrooms with the cheesist crust possible (yup, we're in Asia and had a western meal....), managed to take the subway, called the BTS, to the downtown area where Carrie works, spend a couple hours walking around and return without getting lost!

Best part of Bangkok: street food on every corner, buying a piece of raw meat wrapped in seaweed and eating it (I actually thought that's how the thai's eat it...little did I know that they just store it in the seaweed before they cook it), and the crazy tuktuk ride.

Now, on to Vietnam.

We arrived in Hanoi last night, on a small plane that didn't have AC. We found our hotel ($10/night), had a quick dinner and went to sleep around 11pm. Now, to put this in perspective (pictures will be added later), our room is tiny, without windows and has a shower head above the toilet. At about 2:00, we woke up. Man, were we pissed - we thought jet lag had stolen whole day from us. We both showered quickly, got dressed and walked downstairs to start the day. But, it was still dark outside!!!!! Man...we were confused. Back to bed...

We woke up, ate some soup (typical vietnamese breakfast) and strange egg pancake some beers and we were on our way. Hanoi has about 3.5m residents, and it's rumored to have more than 3m motorcycles. Everywhere you look, there are motorcyles and bikes. It's not like there aren't a plethora of idiot driving cabs, either...there's both. Stop lights practically don't exist, and when they are, no one cares. Everyone just drives, and swerves...and honks nonestop.

After breakfast, we tested our luck on the back of a bike and went to an ethnology musuem and booked our trip to Halong Bay for the next 3 days...

We forgot the cord to upload pics in the internet cafe, so you'll have to wait until we get back to Hanoi on the 9th to upload some more!